Electrolux’s data and analytics roadmap to improved customer experience

Global home appliances company Electrolux owns over 70 brands, including Frigidaire and AEG. They sell approximately 60 million household products in around 120 markets. With an organization of this size, there was great value to be gained by unifying data and deploying analytics. But to implement this kind of change, Electrolux needed a roadmap.

The organization formed a global consumer and analytics team in 2021. At that time, data was very decentralized. They began working with customer data technology company Actable to guide their analytics strategy and help build a roadmap. They also implemented a CDP from BlueConic to begin centralizing and activating data.

“If you took a picture back in 2021, you would see very diverse maturity stages among the business areas — with specific tech stacks and not necessarily communicating with each other,” said Erica Campbell, global consumer data and analytics director for Electrolux, at The MarTech Conference.

Aligning teams with common definitions

In order for Electrolux’s data plan to work organization-wide, standard definitions had to be established about key data points and KPIs.

“What do we mean by consumer data?” Campbell asked. “What are the minimum required fields for a registered product to count [in the system]?”

They also had to deal with compliance questions. Most notably, did the company need an opt-in to consider a consumer to be marketable in every country, even when there was no specific regulation about it in that specific market?

After making sure teams across the organization were aligned on these terms, the next step was to agree on what data to analyze and what calculations to use.

“For example, the product registration rate can be calculated in many different ways,” said Campbell. “We’ve had to align on that and even CLV (customer lifetime value), which is very complex and is taking us a lot of time to discuss the methodology around how we should calculate it.”

She added, “Now it’s all being documented where all the business users can have access to and comment and update on the definition. So, it’s an organic process, but also documented for the data modelers or the visualization tools developers to use in their specific environments.”

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Setting up the roadmap

Electrolux built out its roadmap using three pillars: Analytics, technology and people. The analytics part represented the company’s goal to use data to activate.

“At the beginning of this process, we decided to focus pretty much on the activation side, understanding that we were building out our data — our data lake and models — for the activation,” said Campbell. “We wanted to build capabilities to better target our consumers, provide them with a better experience and improve marketing efficiency.”

To boost technology, Electrolux implemented a global CDP that is currently being piloted in Latin America and will soon roll out to other markets within the organization.

Electrolux also added more sophisticated identity resolution tools on top of what it already had. Between this and the CDP, the company is looking to increase CLV by segmenting customers and personalizing messages more effectively.

In order to use analytics and data technology across the organization, the people working at Electrolux also had to be given priority in the roadmap. Electrolux has more than 50,000 employees.

“We were starting to work with product teams with new people, new roles, and therefore alignment and also working towards reducing manual working — improving team efficiency — was super important,” said Campbell. “So we had to understand what we could do with what we had, and what were the gaps that we had to fill both in technology and in processes.”

Immediate and long-term goals

There are still goals to achieve, and they are part of the Electrolux roadmap.

“My dream wish list is having a predictive segmentation based on all of those data coming from marketing, from products, different data sources — and also from advanced analytics models that we are building,” said Campbell.

She added, “Much of the foundation work has already been done for the first business area that we are implementing the CDP, but we have even more going forward. So it’s a long-term marathon, definitely not a super-quick sprint.”

Campbell also recommended having a CDP product team with a clear product owner who acts as the main point of contact for all the other teams that work with the data.

Having the roadmap in place and building out the technology brings Electrolux closer to making every touchpoint personalized in the customer journey. It’s a big undertaking for a global company with 70 brands, but the payoff in increased CLV can be worth it.

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